


Skeleton Tree

by Illusen



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Drug Addiction, F/M, Friendship, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Modern AU, Muggle AU, Oneshot, Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter), Other, Platonic Female/Male Relationships, Sad, but also sort of canon compliant?, canon inspired at least, in which the order is a radical organization
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-21
Updated: 2019-11-21
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:21:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21514471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Illusen/pseuds/Illusen
Summary: "Things had happened fast after that. James and Lily, Alice and Frank, Dorcas and Peter and all the names he would have to spend years pretending like he’d forgotten. It could have gotten hard to remember his first lost friend under the pile of bodies that came afterwards. But it didn’t."
Relationships: Remus Lupin/Marlene McKinnon
Kudos: 3





	Skeleton Tree

**Author's Note:**

> This piece was heavily inspired by the amazing penumbra-rp on tumblr, in which I played Marlene for a short time. It takes place in the same modern, muggle AU, but imagines that most of the things that eventually happened in canon also happened in this verse. I wrote it quite a while ago, mostly to satisfy my need of writing an "ending" for her, but also to explore how Remus must have felt in the years between the deaths of his friends and being invited to teach in Hogwarts. Fair warning: it's pretty depressing.

In the end, what bothered him was the white. Even at her lowest, most-drug-addled, there had always been at least an ounce of color to whatever fabric had clung to Marlene’s threadbare body. But there was nothing in the sheets of the patient wing. No color, not even yellow, not the barest hint of life or secretion. And even her features, genetically blessed and abused by their owner as they had been, no longer held much of a life of their own. The woman in the bed could have been either very young or very ancient, very beautiful or quite plain, Marlene or anyone else.

She hadn’t died alone. The nurses swore it, anyway, and Remus was in no condition of looking for holes in their story at first. Her respiratory system had gone out at last, along with what little strength was still pushing her worn-out heart, and the girl he had first seen dressed as a skeleton completed her life-long quest to become one. Up until her last day, Marlene had fought her battle with Nurse Boseman, and she had been the one with her when she went. He’d seen her nag the woman during his visits, asking about her grandkids and offering kisses one day, demanding gallons of water and refusing her pills in the other. Boseman would complain about it when Remus was there. But she had also loved that faded out Marlene, loved her with that loud, hard-edged love people saved for the most difficult. She’d told him that it had happened on a Wednesday. Marlene had woken up very weak, barely able to speak. The doctor had tried what he could, but there wasn’t much her body could have withstood at that point.

It was a perfectly plausible scenario and he supposed it could have been a comforting one. Yet, somehow, Remus couldn’t see it. He couldn’t picture the woman he had met going gently into the good fucking night, her cat-like features deformed into a serene death-mask. Marlene would have gone out barking. Screaming.

They couldn’t keep her mother from holding the funeral, so they made their own. A hard-drinking night for hard-drinking Marlene. Life and party, rather than hypocrisy and sorrow. It had turned out to be a complete disaster. Alice had gone home early to feed the baby, dead-eyed and catatonic, and Lily had cried louder than he’d ever seen her, glowing with a red hot rage she could have only stolen from the deceased. James had done his best but none of his jokes had landed and Sirius had done stupid shit the whole night, honoring the dead woman the only way he knew how.

The e-mail had arrived a few days later. In it, Nurse Boseman had asked for his forgiveness. She claimed that there had been a cover-up, a plot to disguise Marlene’s murder. She hadn’t died peacefully after all. Her killer had come in the guise of a visitor and injected something into her IV. But Marlene had seen it. Instead of contenting herself with falling asleep, she had gone out whirring, trying to puke it all out. The man had smothered her with a pillow and threatened Boseman’s family, and their contacts in the hospital had done the rest to cover it up.

They had gone to the police, of course. Alice had insisted that she would press for a more thorough investigation, but Remus knew it wouldn’t mean much. He forwarded the e-mail to Marlene’s rich, politically neutral mother. Three days later, she was killed, along with the rest of the McKinnons. Even Marlene’s father, long estranged from them, turned up floating in his pool in L.A.

Things had happened fast after that. James and Lily, Alice and Frank, Dorcas and Peter and all the names he would have to spend years pretending like he’d forgotten. It could have gotten hard to remember his first lost friend under the pile of bodies that came afterwards. But it didn’t.

He had remembered her most during in his lost years. With Sirius in jail and nearly everyone he had known dead, Remus had lived on the kindness of strangers, fighting a lonesome battle with the sickness in his bones. People had come and gone at that point. There had been landlords and tenants, concerned social workers, neighbors and kids he had tutored.

In his loneliness, navigating poverty and physical frailty, he discovered what it had been like to be Marlene. Those days hadn’t been kind on her memory. More than once, Remus had remembered that it had been a lifestyle that she had chosen. Unlike him, she had destroyed her body with chemicals, renounced her wealthy family, chosen the sickness and squalor with the ease only those who weren’t bound to live in it did. He had stopped seeing her as the unstoppable warrior he had built up in his youth. Marlene’s ghost became that of an erratic, fucked up addict, a destructive anarchist, a poor little rich girl picking at her own scabs.

It wasn’t until years later that Remus finally made peace with her memory. He had returned home to pick up his things after his father’s death, coldly sorting through the meaningless objects in his childhood bedroom. The pain of his upbringing had left him entirely detached from the items that represented it, and he found only a single thing capable of bringing him pain. At the bottom of a drawer, forgotten on a Christmas he had been forced to spend at a home, was group picture he remembered all too well.

They were all there, The Order. All his youthful friends, alive and jeering, whisky-soaked smiles and puffy cheeks from the cold. And in the right corner was Marlene. He had remembered that night, then. The bright blue of her dress, the warmth of her red-smudged mouth, the way she would cling to everyone and anyone. On the first night they had met, she had tied her scarf around him, smiling a chipped smile.

“I can barely feel it”, she’d lied, shaking, “years of wearing fishnets fucked up my skin’s capacity to feel the cold.” On that first Halloween night, dressed as a skeleton and glowing with glitter, Marlene had seemed like something electric. The girl on the picture wore no glitter, but she shone with the same warmth. Her hands hovered above his shoulder. Lonely eyes, mean smile. And then Remus remembered all the nights they had spent up talking, all the tears she had cried when he couldn’t, all the raw tenderness and love that came with Marlene’s proclivity for carving herself up and putting shit up her nose.

He turned the picture over in his hand, already certain of what was written on the back.

“For Remus, with lots of sloppy kisses and not an ounce of puke”. _MArLene._ God, they’d been fucked up that night. He’d held her hair over the toilet.

He could already hear Moody talking about her, pointing her out on his own copy of that unwitting fucking obituary. Their parade of ghosts and the most lively of them all. Blonde hair and a bird nose, shaggy and wild and turned into a sappy story for a kid who would never know her.

"Marlene McKinnon _”_ , he would say _, “_ she was killed two weeks after this was taken _”._

_They got her whole family._


End file.
